Our Work

With rigorous economic research and practical policy solutions, we focus on the issues and institutions that are critical to global development. Explore our core themes and topics to learn more about our work.

Search By

Commentary & Analysis

In timely and incisive analysis, our experts parse the latest development news and devise practical solutions to new and emerging challenges. Our events convene the top thinkers and doers in global development.

Making the Global Financial System Work for All: The G20 EPG Report on Global Financial Governance—Findings & Implementation

The event takes place in the context of the IMF-World Bank Annual meetings in Bali and is organised by Center for Global Development, LSE Institute of Global Affairs, and the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee. For more information contact Mark Plant (mplant@cgdev.org)

In May 2017 the G20 Ministers of Finance appointed the Eminent Persons’ Group (EPG) on global financial governance, led by the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore Tharman Shanmugaratnam, to review the governance of the international financial institutions, looking at their coherence and effectiveness in supporting the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, managing capital flows, assessing risks to financial resilience and addressing non-financial threats to growth and stability.

The EPG report will be presented to the G20 Ministers of Finance and Central Bank Governors at the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings in Bali, Indonesia on October 11th, 2018. Plans are being prepared for the implementation under Japan’s G20 Presidency and beyond. This seminar is the first among a series of meetings and follow-up activities that the seminar organisers plan to hold over the next three years as the EPG report goes through this implementation phase.

The event is intended to solicit and discuss the perspectives of three groups of stakeholders whose engagement is critical in delivering on the EPG’s objectives:

• Development policy officials from advanced countries, emerging markets and low-income developing countries beyond the G20;
• Representatives of civil society engaged in the development debate; and
• Representatives of the key international financial institutions whose individual and collective actions the EPG is aiming to shape.

Indian agriculture remains vulnerable to the vagaries of weather, and the looming threat of climate change may expose this vulnerability further. Using district-level data on temperature, rainfall and crop production, Siddharth Hari’s paper first documents a long-term trend of rising temperatures, declining average precipitation and increase in extreme precipitation events. One key finding is that the impact of temperature and rainfall are felt only in the extreme: when temperatures are much higher, rainfall is significantly lower, and the number of “dry days” greater is than normal. He also finds that these impacts are significantly more adverse in unirrigated areas (and hence rainfed crops) compared to irrigated areas. Can policy makers react to the challenges of climate change and find ways to get “more crop for every drop?"

Estimating intergenerational mobility in developing countries is difficult because matched parent-child income records are rarely available and education is measured very coarsely. In particular, there are no established methods for comparing educational mobility for subsamples of the population when the education distribution is changing over time.

In their recent paper, Sam Asher and coauthors present new methods and new administrative data to overcome this gap, and study intergenerational mobility across groups and across space in India. They find that the intergenerational mobility for the population as a whole has remained constant since liberalization, but cross-group changes have been substantial. Rising mobility among historically marginalized "Scheduled Castes" is almost exactly offset by declining intergenerational mobility among Muslims, a comparably sized group that has few constitutional protections. These findings contest the conventional wisdom that marginalized groups in India have been catching up on average. The paper also explores heterogeneity across space, generating the first high-resolution geographic measures of intergenerational mobility across India, with results across 5600 rural subdistricts and 2300 cities and towns.

AidEx is a two day event, which encompasses a conference, exhibition, meeting areas, awards and workshops. Its fundamental aim is to engage the sector at every level and provide a forum for aid & development professionals to meet, source, supply and learn. AidEx was created to help the international aid and development community engage the private sector in a neutral setting, drive innovation and support the ever-growing need for emergency aid and development programmes.